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Well, this sort of came out of nowhere – not that I’m complaining, mind you. After already waving its magically miserly wand and poofing our dusty old copies of Hard Reset into shiny Extended Editions for free, Flying Wild Hog’s seen fit to hand out yet another freebie. [Edit: It’s actually the Extended Edition’s content, but released as free DLC on Steam. Throw rotten vegetables at me, for I have been a fool.] Titled “Exile,” it’s available now and sends Major Fletcher into “the Barrens – dangerous lands beyond the last human city of Bezoar, where our hero will meet new foes and make new friends.” Friendship always was my favorite part of Hard Reset.

So then, what’s on the docket this time? Well, for zero item-obtaining monetary units, you get five new levels outside Bezoar, four new enemies, a new boss fight, two new survival maps, and more achievements – because objectives aren’t real unless they come with achievements.

I’m especially liking the sound of outdoor levels, seeing as Hard Reset’s dark cyberpunk cityscapes – though quite easy on even the least cybernetically enhanced of eyes – got a little same-y after a while. Also, Flying Wild Hog created a pretty magnificent engine, so it’ll be nice to see it flex its bulging graphical biceps on some happy little bushes and trees. Or, well, maybe some vines, anyway. I can’t think of too many dark cyberpunk worlds overflowing with lush vegetation.

Regardless, merely go here, open Steam, and the DLC will be yours. And if you don’t already own Hard Reset, well, it’s only $15. With the amount of post-launch content Flying Wild Hog’s pumped into its sleek, modern tribute to old-school shooting, there are far, far worse deals out there.

Hah, true. I finished it just a few weeks ago. And though I normally don’t skip cutscenes, towards the end of Hard Reset I certainly was doing just that. And after I hit ESC on one of these cutscenes (where someone was babbling on about godknowswhat) I was surprised to see the end credits start scrolling. What? Was that the last level I just played? Oh.

I guess I could’ve looked up the cutscene on YouTube, had I really cared about how the story ended.

Still a good game, mind you. The gameplay was fun and it looked GREAT. So it’s cool the devs are giving us more levels like this. :)

It makes me feel horrible, but I’m not going to buy this game at this low price, even though it would probably be worth it (loved the demo) and I’d want to support the developers, because there’s the possibility that it’s going on a 66% discount in the summersale or something.

I know the feeling, it’s going to be alright man. It’s going to be all right! You’ll be fine, seriously.

@ Hard Reset: Man this game was the biggest surprise. Beautiful game, and some of the purest, smoothest FPS combat I have ever seen. So much fun. I’m excited for this and probably will roll a new game for this. Although i am kind of scared of the higher difficulties I well feel obligated to try, when I do.

It was a big surprise for me too because I’d read a lot of not-quite-negativity about how it’s almost, ALMOST a good game, then I bought one of the many Indie bundles a while back which had Hard Reset in it, I had a quick go and was extremely pleased with myself for not passing on the bundle after all because that game is amazing. The graphics are incredible for an indie game, there’s got to be at least 120,000 of the bloody things. Apart from the sprint mechanic the gameplay is excellent too and I love how things like the shop are integrated into the game. The atmosphere is incredible but I suspect it helps that I love Blade Runner and had watched it a few days before playing.

Hard Reset is a good modern example of how to serve the PC with shooting the proper way.

The whole robot thing may be debateable(and the anytime save lack), but the aiming, unlimited guns, pickups, classic gameplay etc all are what make me rage so hard against the console port abominations that get laurels and headlined instead.

I never did finish Hard Reset. Got a few levels in on hard, but the graphical clutter all too often meant I could barely distinguish the shiny metal things I had to shoot from the shiny metal of literally everything else on screen. I certainly didn’t find it easy on the eye, at least in that regard. Then it got shoved back into the backlog. Nice to see it still supported though, may have to have another bash at it on a difficulty that doesn’t stamp on me quite so hard whilst i’m busy trying to see where i’m going..

For all the complaints console games get about being ‘dumbed down’ or ‘too accessible’, there really is nothing softer than someone reliant on quicksaves. It’s really not unreasonable to ask the player to stay alive for a minute or two at a time.

That’s silly. Redoing content isn’t an example of difficulty, it’s just a chore that pads out a game. In really hard, smart games, combat is like a puzzle that has to be figured out. In those games saving encourages experimentation and play, which is why they normally have really frequent checkpoints, saving outside of combat, or quicksaves.

In dumb ones its a big pile of mobs or a huge boss with endless hitpoints and a checkpoint. That’s not difficulty, that’s a masochistic Skinner box which sucks in rubes who think that suffering is a virtue.

The save points are some of the worst I’ve seen in this kind of game (shooters/action). There is too much distance between them. In some cases, you are are forced to play less challenging (boring) part again before you can give another shot at the better, more challenging and fun parts where you got yourself killed.

I believe that the design is good enough to allow quick saving or even more frequent save points .

Agreed. The autosaves in Hard Reset should be a textbook case of how not to implement autosaves into a video game. They are spread way too far apart, and they lead to forced replays of huge swatches of the game.

I’d like the option to manually adjust the length between saves, but apparently that’s not going to happen as long as the devs have anything to say about it.

Although I dunno if it’s a bigger or lesser flaw than just how much of a lumbering, slothful, broken-knees hulk the protagonist is. Fast and fluid ’90s FPS it is not, despite how much people want to say “old skool”.

That’s right. So very, very wrong. Those savepoints were nightmarishly horrible. If you’re going to have way-too-difficult drawn out bossfights that are huge difficulty spikes compared to the rest of the game you should at least put a save point after each phase. Or just allow quicksaves as mentioned earlier.

Just by the by, they used to sell this for money, seperately.
They really must have been in quite dire straits financially when they released the game “cut down” then still had to sell the remainder of it to get somewhere.

Its such a shame, given that youknowwhatmanshootseries sells in multi-million dimensions for thrice as much.

Actually felt the autosaves were perfectly placed; just far enough apart so that I trod carefully (not to mention tensely) when entering a room but didn’t scream, snarl and chuck my laptop out of the window at my repeated deaths.

The difficultly is in working out to best use your chosen combination of upgrades/weapons to take out your foes before they splatter you -levels like the Garage and the final Boss were hilarious fun because I kept having to go back and scratch my head as to what combo to use and when.

It really forces you to raise your game and overall skill level, especially tactical use of the sprint function. Eventually, I did manage the final boss first time, no deaths :) [but died earlier in the level so it doesn’t count :( ]

Overall, I thought Hard Reset had a lot subtler, and balanced, mechanics than it got credit for.